Beyond the Book: Background information when reading Fly Trap

Beyond the Book

This article relates to Fly Trap

Frances Hardinge
As soon as I got to know Mosca, the main character in Fly Trap, I felt sure that author Frances Hardinge was a unique and unusual person whom I would like to know better.

After a bit of research, I learned that she grew up in Kent, in the South of England, "in a huge, isolated old house in a small, strange village," and began writing stories about magic when she was very young.

Hardinge studied at Oxford University and helped form a writers' group there. She is the author of four books: Fly By Night (2005), Well Witched (2007), The Lost Conspiracy (2009), and FlyTrap (2011), and she has published numerous short stories, including "Behind the Mirror" and "Halfway House." She does not go out without a hat, usually a black fedora, as she says she keeps her personality there.

Hardinge has one of the coolest author websites I have seen in a while, which you can visit at www.franceshardinge.com. In The Great Hall, you can find in-depth interviews with the author, see photos of her and her many bats, read her Dark Diary, and learn more about her writing history.

Best of all is the video clip below. In it, she discusses writing Fly Trap, and she talks about her travels around the world seeking extreme adventures and other oddities.

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This "beyond the book article" relates to Fly Trap. It originally ran in August 2011 and has been updated for the October 2012 paperback edition. Go to magazine.